


Steel, Shards, Shambles

by dawnstruck



Series: Role Reversal [2]
Category: Fullmetal Alchemist (Anime 2003)
Genre: Dubious Consent, M/M, Role Reversal, Перевод на русский | Translation in Russian
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-28
Updated: 2015-11-28
Packaged: 2018-05-03 20:30:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,554
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5305787
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dawnstruck/pseuds/dawnstruck
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>And in that moment Al realizes that, when Ed had said 'I fell', he meant it in an entirely different way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Steel, Shards, Shambles

**Author's Note:**

> This is a continuation/companion fic to "Heart of Ore" and if you haven't read that one, this one won't make much sense.
> 
> I have decided on a) doing not only Ed's POV but first Al's as well, b) making the RoyEd more explicit, and c) taking it all to a new level of fucked-up-ness. In other news, I am going to hell.
> 
> Edit: Ingefaerel has taken the time to translate this into Russian which you can read here: https://ficbook.net/readfic/5428596

Ed is older, but Al is taller, is tougher.

Ed still talks in his sleep sometimes and asks for dad, asks for mom, asks for miracles. Al just lies awake and curses the world.

“You have to take care of each other,” mom had told him on her death bed, but when she looked at him with her eyes as green as his but ever so much gentler he had known that what she really meant was, Protect your brother.

 

He knows that he has spectacularly failed at that when the transmutation goes wrong, when he comes to and finds Edward lying in a puddle of blood.

He feels oddly detached. His thoughts are panicky, drawing up a blank when he tries to think of what happened the last few minutes, but his heart is not beating erratically. His blood does not rush in his ears.

Oh, he thinks when he scoops his brother up, and his body groans and clangs with every movement, when he finds himself two meters tall and completely _heartless_.

He does not feel Ed's weight in his arms, but his somehow seeing eyes are drawn towards the gory mess in the dark of the basement.

Protect your brother, Trisha's eyes had said back them.

Now all they scream is, Run.

So Alphonse does.

 

“You can't become a state alchemist,” Mustang tells him, “It's too dangerous.”

“Fuck that,” Al snarls, “If it's too dangerous for me, it's too dangerous for him.”

“Automail can easily be explained,” the Colonel objects calmly, “A missing body cannot. You either stay by his side without a license, or you risk becoming a lab rat while he goes to rot in prison. Your choice.”

It isn't, though. None of it was ever a choice and Alphonse knows that the Colonel knows he knows, and teacher had called Amestrian soldiers dogs of the military but it rather feels like he is throwing his brother to the wolves.

 

One wolf in particular, as it turns out.

Because Al is not unaware of how the Colonel is watching his brother.

And it's not like Al isn't used to being inspected like a museum exhibit himself, but Mustang looks at Ed as though he were a very rare specimen, extremely skittish, almost extinct.

But it's not a scientific interest, not bookish and dusty and neatly pinning butterflies behind glass displays, labeled and preserved.

Instead, it's cruel boys catching a butterfly in crueler hands, feeling its helpless struggle graze against rough palms, till the poor thing has exhausted itself, till its wings are ripped from its body, rubbed to shimmering particles between thumb and finger, fading to nothingness.

And butterflies cannot fly with automail wings.

 

“Touch my brother and you're dead,” Al warns in an otherwise empty hallway and he's never meant a threat more earnestly.

“Touch me and your brother is dead,” Mustang says and smiles.

Al has never been very good at chess.

 

“What happened?” Al asks when Edward returns from the office one day, his nose broken, his face bloody, his ribs bruised.

“Nothing, I fell,” Ed brushes him off, brushes past him.

“Don't lie,” Al growls because if there is one thing his brother owes him it's the truth.

Ed head sinks further.

“Nothing,” he repeats, “Nothing, I had it coming. I swear I had it coming.”

The thing is, nothing is ever really brother's fault, so Al says, “I'm gonna kill him.”

“Don't!” Ed twirls around and his eyes are wide, “Don't do that, Al, don't touch him, it's too dangerous, just let him, let me, forget it, don't think about it-”

And in that moment Al realizes that when Ed had said _I fell_ he meant it in an entirely different way.

 

“You're playing with fire,” Al warns when Ed goes to see the Flame Alchemist once more, even though his old bruises have not yet faded.

“Don't provoke him, Al,” Ed whispers furiously, as though the walls in their dorm were listening in, “Don't provoke him, I know what I'm doing, I know-”

I know what I'm doing, is what he had said whenever Al voiced doubts about human transmutation.

I know what I'm doing, when clearly he doesn't.

Only this time, Ed doesn't even need to paint an array onto his chest to accept losing his heart.

 

Sometimes Ed returns with bruises on his neck. Sometimes they are fingerprints. Sometimes they are not.

“I can never tell,” Alphonse says slowly, for once not even bothering to look up from his book, “Whether he wants to kill you or fuck you.”

Ed freezes, doesn't say anything, thaws up again, violently pulls his braid over his shoulder, tugs at it.

Does he like having his hair pulled, too?

“I guess he hasn't actually killed you yet,” Al muses, closing his book with a soft thud, making his next words appear all the harsher, sharper, “Has he fucked you?”

“Al, shut up, please shut up,” Ed begs, sinks down on the bed and cowers between his arms, neck bent but not broken.

Alphonse would cry if he could, but like this his voice only sounds a little strangled.

“I just don't know what's worse,” he whispers, “If he's blackmailing you, forcing you. Or if he doesn't have to.”

Then, “Do you want to be with him?”

Ed doesn't answer and that isn't a yes, but it also isn't a no, and Al has no idea what to make of that.

 

“He used to be a good man, you know,” Hawkeye tells him when they are waiting in the outer office, not yet knowing in what shape Edward will appear again.

“That's not an argument that would hold up in a trial,” Al scoffs.

“Sometimes people do bad things with good intentions,” she muses and her eyes are on the carpet, “Does that make them good or bad themselves?”

She's thinking a basement in Riesembol and of roofs above Ishaval, but Al doesn't care.

“It makes them responsible,” he knows and his hollow insides burn as the door opens and Ed steps out again.

There are no bruises visible on him, but his lips are red and kiss-bitten.

And Al had thought Hohenheim leaving mom had been a betrayal, but this is so much worse, and he hopes to never fall in love at all.

 

“Help me understand,” Al pleads, “Does he write you poetry, does he give good head, what, what do you see in him, why is it the moon instead of madness-?”

“It's not what I see in him,” Ed says quietly, and it is the first time that he has answered any of Al's questions, “It's like he looks at me and knows that there are parts of me other people don't even suspect exist.”

“And are there?” Al wants to know.

“Yes,” Ed nods vaguely, “Yes, there are.”

“Then why don't you show him, why don't you tell him?” Al demands and clenches his huge and helpless fists.

“Because if I did,” Edward says and slowly lifts his head, “He'd stop looking.”

 

“One day I'm gonna kill you,” Al promises when he has broken down the door, broken into the Colonel's house and marched up the dark stairs.

Mustang looks down at the boy in his arms, naked and exhausted and covered in bruises, and swallows.

“Yes,” he nods, his voice thick, “Please do.”

 

 

 

 

“Hey!” Ed says and swings himself around to throw his back against the wall of the hallway Al is already leaning against, “What are you day-dreaming about?”

“Oh,” Al startles because of course he does not sleep anymore and since then his day-dreams have become oddly vivid, strangely disconcerting. Sometimes he forgets that he is quite awake and wholly submerged in reality.

“Nothing,” he claims and is relieved that his face does not show emotions. Yet Ed's eyes still narrow.

“Don't lie to me,” he warns, inching closer, “Did something happen?”

Al remains silent for a moment, subtly checks whether the door to the office is really closed and the hallway completely empty.

“Brother,” he says and keeps his voice neutral, “What do you think of the Colonel?”

Ed's brow twitches.

“That he's a pompous ass who deserves a good beating from time to time?” he shrugs lackadaisically, but there was a moment's hesitation there and Al did not miss it.

“As long as you're not the one getting beaten...,” he mutters yet Ed catches it anyway.

“What?” he snaps, immediately flying into a fit, “Are you implying he would beat me? I could take that bastard any time, you hear me?!”

If Al could he would smile.

“Brother,” he says fondly, “Don't ever change.”

Ed throws his hands up in the air, palms to the ceiling like the mockery of a prayer.

“Why does everyone keep saying that lately?” he demands and Al cuffs his shoulder.

“Because we like you just the way you are,” he says and Ed gives him an odd look, even as he turns to walk down the hallway.

“I'll remind you of that when you complain about the way I eat,” he points out, “Or how I'm too loud. Or how my fashion sense sucks. Or how I need to be more polite. Or-”

His voice reverberates off the wall, vibrant and vindictive, and Al wouldn't have it any other way.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> I am sorry, but I really enjoyed writing this, and I hope to redeem myself with Ed's POV, but I'll probably only make things worse. ;__;


End file.
